A BRIGHT FUTURE

As Good As It Gets

You might think that writing about good weather would tempt the fates. I’ll thumb my nose at the fates and go ahead and write that this spring is the best spring, gardenwise, ever in all the decades since I’ve been gardening. The flowers have been more vibrant with color and, it seems, also in greater profusion. The air has been particularly fragrant, especially now with the intoxicating aroma of black locust blooms following closely on the heels of autumn olive’s sweet scent.
Apple tree in bloom
My fruit trees are most thankful for this spring’s beneficence. In all the years of growing fruit here on the farmden, never has the landscape been so brightened by snowballs of white blooms of plum and pear trees, pinkish blossoms of apples, and peaches’ pure pink blossoms.
Apple blossoms
Peach blossoms
The now-fallen petals are no cause for wistfulness, because those clusters of flowers have now morphed into clusters of fruits

Why this Year?

What makes for such a glorious spring? The weather, of course, both this spring’s in addition to last winter’s and even last spring’s. Let’s first go back to last spring’s weather effects.

During spring 2020 the weather warmed going into April, coaxing flower buds on fruit trees to swell. Then, towards the end of that month and into May, a number of nights saw temperatures that nipped life from many flowers, then open, especially the 22° temperature on April 23rd and then subfreezing temperatures on May 9th, 13th, and 14th. (All this information handily recorded and passed onto my computer via Sensorpush sensors I have at two locations outdoors and one location in the greenhouse.) 
Peach fruitlets
Prelude to the present season began with a relatively mild winter, for which peach flower buds, which suffer damage at around minus 15°, were especially appreciative. And this spring has seen more or less gradually warming temperatures with — and this is most important — no late, damaging frosts. Buds for a current spring’s blossoms develop the summer of the previous year. Seeds in developing fruits produce a hormone that suppresses flower bud formation, so a heavy crop one year means a lighter crop the following year, and vice versa, all other things being equal. Last year’s late frosts knocked out much of the potential fruit crop so this year the trees did what they do, compensating for last year’s loss with more blooms.
Asian pear espalier
Fruit trees can afford to lose a certain number of flowers to cold each year. For instance, each flower bud of an apple tree unfolds to five flowers, and only 5 percent of those flowers need to set fruit for a full crop of apples. Furthermore, a temperature below 32° doesn’t always cause damage; just how much damage ensues depends on the the growth stage of flower buds and how cold it gets. Using apples, again, as an example, when their buds have expanded just enough to hint at the five flowers within (the “tight cluster” stage), 27° will kill 10 percent of them, 21° will kill 90 percent of them. More details for apples and other fruits can be found here.

Another variable is that temperatures can vary a little at various points within a tree, which can be important at these critical temperatures.

Not Yet Home Free

This auspicious spring is not a call for me to just sit back and wait for the delicious bounty to hang on the branches awaiting my picking. My work is cut out for me.

One job, to begin soon, will be thinning the fruit, that is, removing lots of them. In addition to upping the chances for a good return bloom and harvest next year (remember the seeds and the hormones), fruit thinning lets the trees channel more of their energy resources into fewer  fruits. The result: Fruits that remain are larger and more flavorful. Fruit thinning also lessens the chance of limbs breaking under the the load of too many fruits, and lessens pest problems. Two apples touching each other provide good cover for the larvae of codling moths to burrow into the fruits to become the classic “worm in the apple.”

Apple fruitletsCommercially, tree fruits are thinned with chemical sprays but I’ll be thinning by hand. The plan is to reduce the number of fruits to one per bud, leaving the largest and most pest-free, and allowing remaining fruits to sit no closer than about a half a foot apart along branches. Larger kinds of fruits are the ones that need thinning, which is nice because it would be very tedious to thin small fruits, such as cherries. Winter pruning removes some branches with fruit buds, so also contributes to reducing the load, as does trees’ natural shedding of some excess fruits.
Pear fruitlets
Another job, which began a few weeks ago, is keeping an eye out for and protecting fruits from insects and diseases — particularly problematic on a less than perfect site such as here on the farmden. All of the common tree fruits, except for pear, are very prone to these problems throughout much of eastern North America.

On a backyard scale, the problems are few but serious, in some cases serious enough to eliminate almost the whole crop or render it inedible. The major culprits are plum curculio, codling moth, apple maggot, oriental fruit moth, brown rot, apple scab, fire blight, and cedar apple rust. Not to mention deer and squirrels.

My tack is to take a multi-pronged approach, with some spraying (mostly organic), nurturing the soil (lots of mulch and compost) and the plants (pruning and fruit thinning), fostering beneficial insects with plantings that encourage their presence and with careful choice and limited amount of sprays, trapping pests (hanging fake apples, Red Delicious, with sticky Tanglefoot in trees), and possibly bagging individual fruits. See Grow Fruit Naturally for more about these approaches.

Even if there is “many a slip ‘twixt the cup and the lip,” every fruit grower has to be an optimist.

Plant Sale Reminder

This is the last week of my annual plant sale. For more information, go to https://leereich.com/2021/05/last-week-of-2021-plant-sale.html

And, A Free Webinar, “Weedless Gardening”

For more information, go to www.leereich.com/workshops.

LAST WEEK OF 2021 PLANT SALE

Lee Reich’s 13TH (?) ANNUAL PLANT SALE
(of mostly lesser grown but delectable fruits)

fig, lowbush bb, alpine sbBecause of covid, the sale is now online, with scheduled pickups here at the farmden in New Paltz, NY.

Limited quantities of plants are still available (September Sun female kiwiberry, various varieties of fig, Blue Sunset lowbush blueberry, and Pineapple Crush white alpine strawberry). All are truly delectable fruits on truly beautiful planats. So order soon.

To see plant list, order, pay, and — VERY IMPORTANT — schedule a pickup time (May 29-31 and June 2, 2021) when you order, go to https://leesannualplantsale.squarespace.com

GARDENING “HANDWORK”

To Haul or Not to Haul

Hauling manure hardly seems to make sense these days, considering that lugging 500 pounds of horse manure gives plants about the same amount of food as a 50 pound bag of 10-10-10. And the latter for only about ten bucks!

Human manure piles, China, 1900

Human manure piles, China, 1900

But whereas 10-10-10 supplies only food (and only three of the sixteen needed nutrients at that), manure has other benefits: it aerates the soil; it helps soil capture and cling to water; and it renders nutrients already in the soil more available to plants. Nutrients from synthetic fertilizers are used up or washed out of the soil by the end of a season, yet benefits from each application of manure last for years. Even ingredients of a concentrated organic fertilizer have little benefit as far as soil aeration and water retention are concerned.

Manure is a traditional way of feeding plants, to the extent that applying synthetic (chemical) fertilizers once was referred to as a form of “manuring,” and certain plants grown specifically to improve the soil are called “green manures.”

When we talk of manure, though, we really mean animal excrement plus bedding. The bedding itself –- usually hay, straw, or wood shavings -– is itself responsible for some of the benefits of manure. The amount of nourishment manure supplies to a plant the first season depends on the ratio of bedding to excrement. More bedding means less nourishment to plants the first season, but greater residual effect for subsequent seasons. Unfortunately, bedding also can be a source of weed seeds.

Mostly manure pile

Long ago my compost piles were mostly manure

“Hot manures” are so called because they readily heat up when stacked in a pile. The heat comes from the burst of microbial activity stimulated by these manures’ relatively high concentrations of nitrogen and low concentrations of water. Horse and poultry manures are “hot;” cow and pig manures are “cold.”

How to Handle It, Generally

Okay, so you have manure in hand, or rather in pitchfork (a five-tined pitchfork is my preference for manure handling). What next?

Most gardeners dig it into the soil immediately. If the manure is well rotted -– meaning bits of hay, etc. no longer are recognizable –- planting can proceed as soon as the soil is smoothed.

If the manure is relatively raw, wait at least 2 weeks for things to settle down, microbially speaking, before planting. Especially if this raw manure has a high proportion of bedding, a much longer wait is needed before planting. Microbial decomposition of that extra carbon-rich bedding requires nitrogen which, if in sufficient amounts are not in the associated manure, must come from soil reserves. Microbes are more adept at getting at that nitrogen than are plants, so plants are starved — at least until the extra carbon is digested (and the carbon/nitrogen ratio in the ground is about 20/1). One advantage to digging manure into the garden in autumn is that it avoids any delay in planting in spring.
Spreading manure on a farm
In lieu of digging, just lay manure on top of the ground as mulch. This is fine if the manure is rotted, but nitrogen volatilizes from fresh manure exposed to sun and wind. The nitrogen loss is wasteful, but may be worth the sacrifice considering the benefits of the mulch. And the nitrogen starvation mentioned previously doesn’t occur because decomposition is very slow, at the interface of the mulch and the soil.

And More Specifically

Spreading compost

Spreading compost

I have access to more horse manure than I could ever possibly want, and the way I usually handle the manure is to compost it before putting it on or in the soil. In a compost pile, manure is mixed with other ingredients (garden residues, vegetable scraps, leaves, soil, etc.), so the result is a better-balanced fertilizer. Also, the heat of composting kills most weed seeds present in either the excrement or the bedding.

The amount of manure to add to soil depends on whether the manure is rotted or fresh, and what kind of animal provided the manure. You can add too much manure to soil: I once had a chicken farming neighbor who killed his asparagus bed by blanketing it under 6 inches of chicken manure (very hot stuff!). Twenty-five to 50 pounds per hundred square feet is about the right amount.

(Manure is the only bulky, beneficial source of organic nitrogen. Some other sources are kitchen scraps, young plants, cultivated and wild — as in “weeds” —  and especially, legumes.)

  The word “manure” comes from the old French word manoevrer, meaning “to cultivate by hand” (in turn from the Latin words for “hand” and “work”). All this manure handling is a lot of physical work, but isn’t exercise another benefit of gardening?

Plant Sale in Progress (mostly fruits, many uncommon, and uncommonly delicious ones)

A reminder: my plant sale, online with live pickup, is in progress for another few days. To view the plant list, to order, to pay, and — VERY IMPORTANT — to schedule a pickup time (May 29-31 and June 2), go to https://leesannualplantsale.squarespace.com

PLANT SALE NOW LIVE

Lee Reich’s 13TH (?) ANNUAL PLANT SALE
(of mostly lesser grown but delectable fruits)

Because of covid, the sale is now online, with scheduled pickups here at the farmden in New Paltz, NY.

Note that there are limited quantities of al plants, each available to the first taker. So order soon.

To see plant list, order, pay, and — VERY IMPORTANT — schedule a pickup time (May 29-31 and June 2), go to https://leesannualplantsale.squarespace.com

MICHELANGELIC ASPIRATIONS

I Start with the Easiest

I spent an hour or so today working on my sculptures. Yes, they were out in the garden. No, they were not stone renderings of fish spouting water into a pond or of ethereal females sprinkling the ground with flower petals. These sculptures are quite large and, as you might guess, the are green, with leaves. 

Some of the sculptures have been completed; some are works in progress. The easiest of these sculptures are nothing more than short hedges, one of boxwood and the the other of yew. Each makes a cozy enclosure, the yew for my front stoop and the boxwood for a bed of Smooth (Hills-of-Snow) hydrangea, a hop vine climbing a trellis, and a Sweet Autumn clematis climbing a brick wall.

Yew at front stoopWith flat tops and nearly vertical sides, both hedges are quick and easy to prune. They both widen slightly from head to toe because, quoting from the “hedging” section of my book, The Pruning Book, “If the top is wider than the bottom, the bottom will become shaded. Over time, the shaded portions will die out, leaving gaps in the hedge.”

(Could these two hedges hardly qualify as “sculpture?” I contend that creating any three-dimensional object requiring aesthetic decisions as to shape and size qualifies as “sculpting.”) 

A hedge out in back of my home takes longer to prune because the hedge itself is longer as well as, in some parts, higher. This 50 foot row of privet bushes is waist height through most of its length except for the gentle upward sweep it takes as it approaches either end. After climbing 8 feet, the sweeps level out, continuing on to create the top of an arch beneath which is an opening through which I can walk, even drive my tractor.

Catty-corner to the swooping hedge (which, in its earlier stages, I was going to sculpt into a two-headed dragon) is another hedge with a pass-through. This hedge forms a high wall a few feet off the back wall of my workshop, and it’s pass-through iswide enough and, with its slight bump up above it, also high enough so that anything that fits through the barn door can also fit through the pass-through. 
Intersecting hedges
The plant that makes up this hedge is Tea crabapple (Malus hupihensis), an interesting plant not usually hedged. It produces seeds that are apomictic, a botanical quirk where, to quote from another of my books, The Ever Curious Gardener, the plant produces “seeds that are not the result of pollination, but that develop from the same kind of cells that make up the rest of the plant.” (All seedlings and the mother plant are clones of each other. These were extra seedlings from those I had grown for research use when I worked for Cornell University.)

Left to its own devices, a Tea crabapple would grow up to 40 feet high and produce fragrant, white blossoms and cherry-size crabapples. For decades, I’ve kept the row of seven of them only 15 feet long, 3 feet wide, and 9 feet high. They don’t mind except with all that pruning, flowers or fruit are rare.

Heads and Clouds

Now we come to the more difficult hedges, ones that are more sculptural. Both are yews, a plant that tolerates just about any kind of pruning. I have written about both hedges previously. Since I revisited them today with pruning and hedge shears, I thought it was time to revisit them on the page also.

The first is not a hedge, but a solitary, giant old yew bush that, at more than 40 years old, predates my tenure here. For most of that time, it was pruned to the shape of a 15 foot high and wide cone. More recently I’ve pared away at it to try to morph that cone into a giant head.

Problem is that the interior of a plant cone that size is dark, so the stems within lose their leaves. Some of them dry out and die back. As a result the yew head’s eye sockets and mouth, both of which were supposed to be green recesses are dark — and a bit foreboding.
Yew bush pruned to a head
Today’s pruning was geared to shearing the whole bush to keep it from growing too large, and shortening all the dead wood deep within the eye and mouth sockets. New sprouts should then appear within those once-shaded gaps. 

The other sculpting challenge started life very conventionally, as four yew hedges planted along the house wall. It was your typical “foundation” plants and planting. Years ago, for fun, I sculpted the hedge into a giant whale and, a few years later, a giant caterpillar. Easy.
Caterpillar yew
More recently, I decided to go more abstract and artistic, with “cloud pruning.” Or, as Jake Hobson more accurately terms it, in his informative and visually inspiring book The Art of Creative Pruning, “organic topiary.” He describes this pruning as creating forms that take “on a decidedly organic character, as though they were made of wax and exposed to the sun too long. Definition is lost, in favour of natural, flowing lines.” That’s my goal, thus far hinted at but unachieved. I find it difficult to unshackle the hedge from the three individual bushes that comprise it.
Organic topiary yew

If Only Michelangelo…

So much in gardening involves taking time to step back and admire your finished work. With these sculptures, even the simplest ones, it’s important to do so periodically while sculpting.

It’s all fun and very satisfying. If I make a mistake, I can just wait for the plant to grow back. Just think if Michelangelo could have stepped aside for a few weeks while his marble grew back for another round of being chipped away.

On the other hand, he would not have to chip away at the finished piece every few months through summer to keep it in shape. These sculptures need multiple prunings through the growing season to keep their shape.

CALLING ALL VOLUNTEERS

A Returning Beauty

I have some of the nicest volunteers in my garden. Some of them have been people, many of them are plants, and one of my favorites – among the plants, that is – is columbine. Years ago, I planted some native columbines, those dainty plants whose orange and yellow flowers hover on thin stalks above their ferny foliage. Since being planted, these wildings self-seed – volunteer, that is — every year in various nooks and crannies around my yard, such as in the thin crevice of soil between my bluestone front path and the adjacent stone wall.
       Native columbine
I once also planted cultivated columbines, the common McKana Giants, and their offspring have been volunteering around the yard as well. Flowers and foliage of these more cultivated sorts are similar to the natives, just bigger in all respects, which is not necessarily better. Or worse. Just different.
Cultivated columbine
Colors of these larger columbines are different from that of the natives. My original McKana Giants sported various colored bracts and petals. Seedlings of these plants, 20 years later, have segregated out into just a few solid colors, and the cool thing is that each year’s colors are a bit different from the previous years’.

Columbine and trumpet honeysuckle

The once “high-bred” columbines back by my vegetable garden have mostly soft pinks flowers, a color that marries well with the scarlet of the trumpet honeysuckles behind them.
Right near my front door, poking through cracks between the bluestone patio and my home’s brick wall, is a big, beautiful columbine with dusky, purple flowers.

I do help out these volunteers by weeding out those in excess or interloping where they shouldn’t.
volunteer columbine

Greenhouse Volunteers

Not all my volunteers are beauties. Some are only practical.

For instance, in the greenhouse, I once planted claytonia, also known as miner’s lettuce. It’s one of many lesser known “greens” that thrive in cool weather so are good for adding variety to salads once fresh cucumbers and tomatoes are just a memory.

Since that first planting, late every fall claytonia shows up all over the place in the greenhouse with no help from me. “All over the place” usually applies to a weed, but when I grab a whorl of claytonia leaves and lift gently, the plant gives in and lifts, hardly disturbing the soil.
Claytonia in greenhouse
This past winter was relatively mild and, for the first time, I see a few claytonia plants out in the garden. Uh-oh.
Claytonia in garden
Years ago, I would sow celery seeds in flats in February for transplanting in May; the seeds take a long time to sprout and then the seedlings grow very slowly. No more. I once grew celery for winter in the greenhouse and, in spring, when seed stalks started pushing up from the plants’ middles, I decided to let the plants do their thing. They self-seeded, so all I need to do these days is weed out excess. Some of those excess can also be potted up for transplanting into the garden.

Some greenhouse volunteers — mâche and cilantro — help out both in the greenhouse and in the garden. That’s nice of them because then I get the early crop in the greenhouse and the later crop outdoors.

Mâche show up in winter in the greenhouse, again in early spring and then again in late summer. The early spring crop is from plants that overwintered; mâche, though delicate in texture and flavor, is perhaps the most cold-hardy and among my favorite of all fresh salad greens. In spring, plants go to seed and the seeds slumber in the ground until cool weather coaxes them to sprout.

Mache

Mache

Cilantro, in contrast, only sprouts in late winter in the greenhouse and mid-spring out in the garden. It does so profusely. Like claytonia it never segues over into the category of “weed” because any excess is easily removed.

Sacrilege and Hope

One volunteer that shows up only outside, in the garden, is garlic. This may sound like sacrilege, but I don’t grow garlic. Many years ago I did, and then decided to devote the garden space to vegetables whose garden-fresh flavor is truly better than anything I could buy. And anyway, I don’t use that much garlic. So I stopped planting it.

Garlic did not go away, though. It’s been propagating by the little offsets it produces atop its flower stalk to the point where it’s everywhere among the leaf-mulched berry plants adjacent to my garden. (It’s not allowed in my garden.) The mostly grassy plants hardly ever yield bulbs worth saving but the tender, grassy stalks are useful. If I call this a weed in my garden, the parts of my garden where I grow it are indeed very weedy.
Naturalized garlic
At the other extreme is one volunteer that once liked it here, but evidently no longer does. That’s dill, which used to self-seed in just the right amount, and usually would confine itself to the same corner of my vegetable garden.

A couple of years ago, only one or two plants showed up, and last year none. I’m not sure why. I want it to come back so I bought some seeds for this year. I’m hoping it comes back as a volunteer again in future years.